Guiding the Blog Experience

In addition to highlighting the need to adequately prepare students prior to using a blog; authors consistently identify the importance of supporting students and guiding their blog reflection while in the workplace context.  Beatson and Larkin (2010) indicate that it is important to provide specific triggers and prompts in order to encourage effective reflection on practice.  Wright (2011) reports that students in her Twitter project were provided with seven topics as recommended content for their reflective entries. 

In addition to providing prompts for reflections, the need to establish guidelines and standards was stressed in many of the studies reviewed.  Ladyshewsky and Gardner (2008) identified a sample blog entry as a support recommended by students.  

Authors stated that both students and academics recognized the need to set standards for the minimum number of posts required in order to ensure student engagement (Ladyshewsky & Gardner, 2010; Wolf, 2014; Wright, 2011).  

Both Ladyshewsky and Gardner (2010) and Wright (2011) also stressed the need to set deadlines for contributions to ensure that reflection was an ongoing and formative activity.  They expressed a concern that students would not develop their reflective ability as effectively if all entries were posted at the end of the work term.